


empty and aching and i don't know why

by sonofahurricane



Series: usually you're dead to get your own museum [1]
Category: Captain America (Movies), Captain America - All Media Types
Genre: Gen, Navel-Gazing, Patriotism, Self-Indulgent, museum studies
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-05
Updated: 2014-07-05
Packaged: 2018-02-07 12:25:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,033
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1898991
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sonofahurricane/pseuds/sonofahurricane
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Steve is asked by museum curators to come in and give an oral history. Encounters in DC force him to think about American history, patriotism, and ways to make Congress angry. [Timeline is post-Captain America: The First Avenger through post-The Avengers; not actually TFA!era, despite tags.]</p>
            </blockquote>





	empty and aching and i don't know why

**Author's Note:**

> title from "America" by Simon and Garfunkel. I have so many things to say about this fic, but I will hold off. I will say that it is completely unbetaed and that I am using a mashup of my limited MCU and comics knowledge, and also that the curator's assistant is inspired at least in name by my museum studies professor, who wore her Captain America exhibit t-shirt to construction one day. I hope I have done her (and this story) justice.

The curators at the Air and Space Museum are less than pleased when Steve comes back.

He gets a note once he’s been cleared to make appearances, once he gets the basics down--the war’s been over for years, the US won, everything’s a little different now. There’s shellshock, to be sure, but it’s not like they described in the pamphlets they hand him, not the same. He refuses to see a counselor about it, not because he’s too proud or because he distrusts therapists--he’s been given no reason to distrust them. There’s just no one who has the toolkit to deal with coming back after sixty-odd years of history just passing by. If Rip Van Winkle were here, maybe Steve would talk to him, but beyond the fictional character, there’s pretty much no one.

When the request comes in for a further interview, Fury all but orders him to follow through. Steve would have agreed to it anyway, but Fury seems to think it’s a good replacement for therapy, a way to talk through the changes Steve has felt without the whole ‘therapist’ thing attached to it. Steve’s not sure he follows the logic on that one, but Fury just nods when Steve tells him he’s agreed to it and leaves the tiny apartment that smells like mothballs.

If there’s anything Steve has learned, it’s that there are very few constants in this world. The Smithsonian may have always felt a little like the cultural embodiment of the castle that contained it, but now the collection, like so much of America, is splintered and divided. A better representation of how it always was, Steve muses, but there is something in his chest that aches as he enters the castle and finds only administrators and offices.

The curator's assistant is a bubbly, bright girl with a graduate degree in museum studies and a long braid in her hair. She explains that really she's very, very close to a doctorate, is ABD--all but dissertation--and that she hopes once she gets it she can really go after a curatorship of her own, maybe something smaller. Sure, she has a pretty damn--sorry, darn cushy job here, and she's so grateful for it, but sometimes the culture can be a little insular and they really have to wrangle with Congress to get anything done at all. Steve nods quietly, his big knees practically pressed up against his chest in the tiny chair in her office. She asks if he'd like anything to drink, and if he'd ever been to DC before.

"A few times, while I was touring. Back then this building was all you folks had." The girl beams while pouring him a glass of water he didn't ask for, setting it in front of him and explaining how many different museums they have now. 19 museums in all here in the States, plus 140 more abroad and 9 research centers. The Air and Space Museum is so big, it takes TWO buildings to hold it all, although the 'exhibits' at the second one, the off-site one, are all just planes and things, nothing much in the way of real constructed education. She asks if he'd like to see it, and Steve finds himself saying yes ma'am, because he can't seem to say anything else. She's so excited that she drops her keys three times on the walk to her car, two blocks away, because parking in DC is a bit--big problem.

"It's a fucking shame," Steve says, playfully--he knows not everyone in the 21st century curses as much as Nick Fury does, and normally he would try to hold back from using the Big F Bomb in the presence of a stranger, but she--Cath, she told him to call her, because she's only the assistant after all--seems on edge and keeps glancing at him every time a half-curse slips past her lips. She giggles nervously and unlocks her car with the press of a button, sliding into the driver's side and settling back.

Steve loves cars. He likes how slow they travel across DC streets, how the traffic is so bad--like it always was, always has been in New York. He watches the miles and miles of tourists snake by, and tries to put his memory of the way it was overtop the image he's looking at. It's hard--there are so many new buildings now, and construction, construction, construction all over the mall. Cath tells him it's pretty much always like this, that they're going to be working on a brand new museum for African American Culture and History. She rattles off the name like a good professional at a press conference, and Steve asks her if she's helped at all with the planning for it.

"No," she says as she deftly changes lanes, narrowly avoiding both a family of tourists and a red light, "my job is pretty much just to worry about you and the Howling Commandos--in the least creepy way possible, I mean." She glances at him worriedly as a taxi slips into the lane next to them, and then the one they’re in, pulling ahead of them. She crashes on the brakes, swearing and laying on the horn. "Watch the FUCK where you're going, asshole!" she shouts, and there's no apology this time, just the flush of embarrassment and anger over her face and the jerking of the wheel as she pulls over into the next lane.

They're headed out of the city. Steve can see through the back window, over her shoulder, a new memorial with fountains and then the Lincoln Memorial further up the Mall, that old standard. It feels good to be in DC again, even though right now he's leaving it.

Cath explains she figured they'll start out of town, at the Udvar-Hazy Center, so he can peruse the planes if he likes before she carts him back into town to see the rest of it, including his own exhibit. "Then if you want, we can see some other museums," she offers. "You probably want to get a feel for everything before we sit down for the oral history." The reason he's been called to DC in the first place. It wouldn't kill Fury to wait for a few days while Steve helped this nice woman out with their exhibit--about him, which is still embarrassing, but so was being surrounded by dancers on a stage in front of his fellow soldiers. So was getting rejected from the Army. Steve can put a smile on for this nice girl and help her out with her job.

"Unfortunately, we can only go to the visitor's observation deck--I don't have the clearance to get you on the floor, and it's viewing hours any way. If you'd like, when Dr. Jenkins is back in DC I could have him arrange a much more up close viewing for you." Cath deftly navigates her way through the sparse parking lot and pulls into and empty space, pulling the keys out of the ignition and unbuckling herself in the same motion. Steve follows her, nodding as she explains that they didn't have enough space at the Air and Space Museum to house all of their holdings, so this is where they were housing the things that didn't fit. "The aircraft you, uh- went down with..." Cath trails off and gestures vaguely toward the front doors as they walk closer to the building. "There's definitely not enough space in the current exhibit at the official museum itself, so it will probably go here, once we can get it restored."

Now there is something Steve hasn't considered. Sure, he'd been pulled out of a plane, but was there enough to salvage from for an exhibit? He takes in a deep breath, and they walk in brief silence through the glass doors of the atrium toward the visitor viewing deck. Cath exhales heavily as they file into the deck, her eyes glued to the far end of the hanger.

A massive number of aircraft of many kinds fill the hanger, some looking pretty goddamn futuristic to Steve and some looking painfully familiar to him. "So, uh, you can see the World War II planes over there--we have the Lockheed P-38, y'know, which was kind of a big deal, and um, we keep the Enola Gay over here after the fiasco back in the nineties--"

"What fiasco?" Steve asks, and Cath leans heavily against the railing, sighing dramatically.

"It's... complicated," she says, staring out into the hanger again. "We had an exhibit that was supposed to go up in '95--you know, uh, fifty years after the end of the war. It was going to focus on the Enola Gay and the stuff surrounding it, the bomb."

'The bomb?' Steve thinks, though he tries to keep his confusion to himself and listen intently to Cath as she carries on.

"And basically the Legion sunk it before it even started, you know, because once the Legion came out against it, no Congressperson was going to TOUCH it, and there were like three or four committee hearings--this was years before I was with the Smithsonian, but it's still a kind of sore spot, you know? So it was all that stuff, the threat of funding meant this super watered down exhibit with no real information--I mean, some basic stuff, but it was such a balance earlier, between the testimony of airmen and soldiers on the ground who got to go home, and responses from the Japanese government, ongoing health records, that sort of thing. It was just a mess, and it could have been SO GOOD, but instead..." Cath waves vaguely in the direction of the large, almost blimp-shaped plane, with 'ENOLA GAY' painted in bright black letters on its side. "Instead it gets shoved down in here where no one bothers to read the copy and no one cares."

Steve nods quietly, and with a deeper sigh, Cath pushes herself from the railing and they're off again, because at this rate they'll get back to DC with enough time for Steve to see his own exhibit before it closes. But DC traffic is notoriously horrific, as it should be, and they've run out of time--something Steve is privately glad for. Cath apologizes profusely, brushing her hair out of her face, still red from road rage, and offers to drive Steve back to his hotel.

"Oh, no, it's no problem," Steve insists. "I walked here, I can walk myself back with no real issue. I'm fine, really. Thank you so much, and I will see you tomorrow at 9 o'clock for the interview, yes?" Cath confirms and watches him go before hurrying back into the building, her phone out of her pocket for the first time since they met, frantically texting, Steve supposes. He shoves his hands in his pockets and heads back to the hotel.

They've taught him how to use a computer, sure, have offered him a laptop which he accepted quietly because he knew he had so much catching up to do, and he wanted to do it on his own time, didn't want to be dependent on other people to teach him everything he's missed. And yet, somehow, he's missed this, missed that the war ended with... with this. With a bomb. With THE bomb, as Cath has put it. When he reaches his hotel room, mostly undisturbed by people who recognize him, he sits down at the desk and opens the laptop, and the Google searches begin.

He starts with what he knows, the Enola Gay, and the searches spiral out from there. He wonders how Mrs. Tibbets felt at the time, hearing that the big round plane was named after her; he supposes it's better than naming it after your sweetheart, although there's still something that unsettles him about naming it after your mother. It's not a weapon exactly, just something to carry weapons, and Steve knows better than anyone that women were much, much more than that in the war effort.

But there's no escaping the bomb, even if he can spiral into thoughts about the Tibbets family and about the things he would have named after his own mother. The bombs, really, sitting right in front of his face, tested on US soil and then- and then.

Steve makes the mistake of typing 'Hiroshima' and going to the image search. Maybe, he thinks, it'll make more sense than the words on the screen, scientific explanations he knows he can't absorb like this, sitting in a hotel room with the rapidly sinking sun peering in, red fingers caressing the back of his neck as he squints at the screen. It's dark in the room before he realizes it, and he doesn't know how long he's stuck sitting there in the dark before he comes to, turning on the light at the desk. It doesn't do much to soften the images that he can't stop clicking through, picture after picture after picture of leveled ground and horrifically burned bodies. He wonders at what point they should stop taking pictures and DO something, anything, and then he pushes himself from the desk and heads out into the night.

Red Skull doesn't visit his brain very often--he doesn't like to give the man the pleasure of even being thought of, after all these years--but there's something about the twisted flesh of the victims that calls that monstrous skull back into his mind. There's war and then there's this, whatever this is, something beyond the hell of war and rapidly spiral to something dehumanizing in a way Steve had always associated with the bad guys, with them. This isn't in terms he can talk about, can't reduce it down to 'bullying'. This is something else altogether. There's no Hitler to punch here, just the big silence because your ears have been blown out by scientific advancement.

The DC air is more smothering than refreshing, and he's reminded again as he crosses the streets, headed toward the mall, that the nation's capital was built on a swamp, traded in exchange for war debts paid by the federal government--a move Steve has to admit, he approves of, even if he’s already had SHIELD field any and all phone calls from libertarians who have forgotten when and where he’s from. Washington wanted it on the Potomac, Steve read once, but the swampy air and suffocating humidity killed any number of president’s children, and probably would have killed him before this whole adventure ever started. Now, he’s sweating already as he crosses the final street before the Mall, and even the cars seem to be dragging in the heat, slowly rolling past him as he makes his way towards that lit-up temple at the far end.

It’s not as if Steve doesn’t know that America has a checkered past at best. It’s not like he lived through much of that- that Colonel Phillips received a number of orders that he quietly ignored, intervened on Steve’s behalf, was probably almost court-martialed for letting the Howling Commandos even exist, much less continue to exist. Probably the only reason he wasn’t was because they were damn good at their job, and they had Captain America at the front. Steve grimaces as he heads through the yellow patches of light along the Mall, past the castle he had just visited today. The Germans didn’t give a damn about segregated units, killed and captured them and held them all the same, but the US Army cared deeply about keeping Jim Morita from fighting alongside Dum-Dum, for whatever reason, and would until the end of the war.

Jim Morita. Steve read that Jim had died about eight years ago, surrounded by family and friends, but he had already seen the end of the war when he did. Steve curses himself quietly for never asking about Jim’s family in the States, about his family back in Japan. He’d never offered up any information, either, but it’s not like it was a welcoming time for that information, anyway. They had a job to do. Steve can’t even begin to imagine coming home after that though, can’t imagine seeing those images in real time, knowing what they’d fought so long against was what won the war. Hell, Steve had gone down trying to prevent-

He feels sick in a way he hasn’t since the serum, nauseous and hollow at the same time. His hands shake, and he curls them into fists and tries to breathe deeply. He’d run, if he thought it would help, but instead he heads towards the warm light at the end of the long, dark tunnel: the Lincoln Memorial, the president inside lit up like a birthday cake.

Steve’s always liked the Lincoln Memorial. It’s cool in there, a sweet escape from the DC heat, and there’s something temple-like about it that he appreciates. He knows they’ve finished the National Cathedral by now, though he hasn’t had the chance to visit it yet. He’s sure it nice--of course it is, most cathedrals are--but there’s something about the hush of Memorial that makes the Cathedral’s construction wholly unnecessary. Even when it’s buzzing with tourists, it’s quiet.

It’s really quiet at this time of night. There are a few lingerers with cameras strapped around their necks, an elderly couple who are technically younger than Steve, and a small family--father, mother, and tiny son with his head curled under his father’s chin, thumb stuck firmly in his mouth--wandering around near the Gettysburg Address. They leave him be, for the most part, though there’s a glance of passing familiarity that the elderly man sends him, as if he saw  him on a trading card once, long long ago.

Steve stands at the base of the statue, looking up long legs into the face of Lincoln. He always had a deep affection for Lincoln, likes him maybe more than FDR--but then, what American doesn’t like, even loves, Lincoln. Then, a rumbling. Deep from the recesses of his mind, something he read at the library once, a quotation: “He was preeminently a white man’s president.” Frederick Douglass, during an oration about Lincoln.

Steve’s stomach churns. He knows, of course, that America was far from perfect when he signed up to fight the war. He knows it had been even less perfect before, knows that the government had done things of which he, as an American, was ashamed. A lot of things, actually, now that he thinks about it: slavery and slave trade, the Trail of Tears, Wounded Knee, the Philippines, Jim Crow… The list just goes on. And yet there he is, Captain America, with his shield (it’s in his room, it’s not like he walks around towns with it. Not yet.) He’s Captain America, and he’s standing at the foot of the white man’s president, feeling sick about the fact that the superweapon he almost died trying to stop from happening didn’t matter in the end, that the country he claims to represent used a superweapon of its own, against civilians. Hiroshima was no Dresden. Or was it?

Freedom has to be protected, Steve reminds himself grimly, and he looks into the face that condemned 600,000 men to die for causes he himself didn’t even believe in, and he swallows hard. Paul Tibbets deserves honor, but those children in the street deserve to be remembered too. At the end of Lincoln’s war, almost a hundred and fifty years ago now (finally, something older than Steve,) there was freedom, but there was also a lot more suffering. Whose freedom has to be protected? Formerly enslaved people became sharecroppers because someone didn’t protect their freedom, because someone had denied them their freedom. Jim Morita’s family, neighbors, whoever, had been herded into horse stables like animals and everyone stood by, accepted it as a cost of war.

Lincoln’s face peers down at Steve, lit from above so his sunken, kindly eyes take on a sorrowful turn from where Steve’s standing. We have to do better, Steve thinks, and he turns on his heel, like they learned to do in the army, and strode away back into the night.

Cath is surprised to see him so early the next day. He knows she’s surprised, because she squeaks and nearly drops both her office keys and her coffee when she sees him in the chair outside her office.

“Ca-ca-Captain Rogers!” she stutters, and fumbles with her keys as Steve rises from his chair with a soft smile. “I- uh. I wasn’t expecting you, I thought we said nine for our appointment.”

“Yes, we did say nine. I’m early, I’m sorry. I just had a few more questions about a couple of the planes we saw yesterday. Are you too busy to answer them, or-”

“Oh, no!” she sputters, and finally gets the right key into the door of her office. “Absolutely not, I’d be more than pleased to do that, and if you want I can discuss the plans to put the craft you were found in-” She pulls the door open and stumbles inside, caught up trying to both move and hold the door for Steve.

“Actually, I have some questions about the Enola Gay exhibit…”

She ends up giving him some literature (“It was almost ten years ago, I don’t even remember it being on the news or anything, to be honest…”) and he sits quietly in the too-small chair while she furiously pounds out some emails that he can’t be sure are actually real, given the non-stop rate of her typing. He gives up trying to decide whether or not she’s trying to humor him or actually doing work, and focuses instead on the arguments in the article series.

It’s complex, and it gives him a headache, trying to navigate it all. When he finally puts it down, he looks back up at Cath and exhales heavily. As if on cue, she stops madly typing and turns to him, her face grim. “Pretty intense stuff, huh,” she asks as she leans over her desk to collect the papers from him.

“Miss, I do not envy you your job,” he responds, shaking his head. “Now I’m afraid to go look at my own exhibit.”

That makes Cath laugh a little bit, albeit darkly, and she taps the papers against her desk to straighten them before putting them back into the binder from which she had retrieved them. “If it makes you feel any better, I don’t think it’s that bad,” she says. “We try- well. There’s not much to be done in the way of controversy; the Howling Commandos are a story visitors seem to love, a sign of racial progress, I guess, in a time that can be iffy for those types of things.”

Steve frowns, looks at her. “No one raised a fuss about all the letters?” Cath pauses, then quickly dives under her desk, coming out with a tiny tape recorder and a legal pad of paper. She leans over the desk to get a pen.

“Is it okay if we record this conversation?” she asks, and there’s a ghost of an amused smile on her lips.

Steve glances back up at her, like he’s unsure what exactly she means. “You wanna do the oral history now?” he asks, because it hardly fits into their conversation.

“If you have the time.” Her eyes sparkle and her thumb rests just above ‘record’ button, slides against it--she’s itching to turn it on, he can tell, and he’s not sure exactly where she’s going with it all.

“Oh-okay, I guess,” he says, because she has to be going somewhere with this whole thing. She presses the button and sits back with a satisfied smile on her face, her features not that far from those of a cat who has just eaten a bird.

“This is an oral history interview on May 25 with Captain Steven Grant Rogers, aka Captain America, done by Catherine Denall for the Captain America exhibit at the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum. Captain Rogers, it’s a pleasure to be speaking with you today.” She picks up the pad of paper and her pen and leans even further back, and Steve can tell she’s enjoying herself immensely--that this is her element, what she loves to do.

“The pleasure is all mine, ma’am,” he says almost automatically, and sits back himself, because this could take a while.

“Captain Rogers, can you tell me about the letters you received about the Howling Commandos?”

The game she’s playing falls entirely into place. Steve grins back at her, adjusts in his chair, and starts, trying to speak as clearly as possible. “I never recieved any letters; Colonel Phillips received them, from his superiors, about the fact that the Commandos was an integrated unit…”

“That’s Colonel Chester Phillips, who recruited you to join Operation: Rebirth--is that correct?”

Steve nods before remembering it’s an audio tape, then clears his throat. “Yes. He showed me one of the letters once--something about the Army not being the place for that kind of civil rights movement, that it was important to keep the units segregated, that the men wouldn’t take being integrated too kindly…”

It takes months for everything to move through. Cath had warned him that was the case, but Steve is a little impatient. She keeps asking him if he wants to see the exhibit, but he doesn’t want to yet, doesn’t want to see himself so well-preserved, without his voice echoing over the new section of the exhibit.

“I’m not history,” he repeats to her, again and again. “I mean, I am, but I’m alive too. I wanna be alive in the exhibit.” She writes it down on her notepad every time they meet, and he says it into the camera when it’s time for the video component that will go into the exhibit.

Then the interviews are done and he’s gone again, back in Brooklyn, and he can’t stop thinking about Bucky and Jim, about Dum-Dum and the Colonel and about Peggy. It wasn’t therapy, sitting with Cath, but it was talking, and it helped a lot more than a pile of broken punching bags. It also brought up a lot more, and Steve wonders sometimes if it’s some sick, twisted narcissism, enjoying talking about yourself.

It’s not until after New York that Steve gets a call from Fury, the exasperated breathing crackling on the other end. “Rogers,” Fury snaps, and Steve wonders what it is he could have done to get the tone normally reserved for Stark. “If you wanted Congress to hate you, would it kill you to tell me first?”

Fury’s always been one to exaggerate. It’s not so much Congress as one new representative, riding his grandfather’s coattails, the same coattails that got flipped over a chair 70 years ago to write some pro-segregation letter that Cath had managed to dig up in Phillips’s personal papers (thank god he had managed to keep those in order, like he knew the letters would be important some day.) All it takes is Steve’s appearance in uniform, repeating the same things he said in the interview about them when Cath had read him the horrific excerpts, and everything is in the clear. Construction rolls on.

The exhibit opens and Steve attends the opening, showing up alone even though Natasha offered to be his date if he wanted one. Steve refuses politely, though he appreciates the offer, and shows up in dress uniform once again, doing his best to answer all the interview questions from reporters, and brushing elbows with any number of senators. He regrets showing up from the first minute, and regrets not bringing Natasha, even though he’s sure she wouldn’t have any fun. The exhibit is beautiful, and he almost gets choked up in there, looking at his old uniforms, looking at the artifacts they’ve gathered from the men, his men. By the end of the night, he finds himself standing in front of Bucky’s portion of the exhibit, looking up blankly into the inscription, when he hears his name.

“Captain Rogers,” he turns, and Cath is standing in a simple black dress and heels, looking more like a grown woman than he has ever seen her look in all their interviews. She smiles softly at him, and raises her eyebrows, gesturing with a glance to their surroundings. “What do you think?” she asks.

“Uh… it’s great,” he says, turning towards her and trying not to look as closed off and alone as he feels. “You did an amazing job.”

He’s not doing a good job of being convincing, and her face falls for a second. “You- you don’t like it? Or…” she looks closer into his face, and he feels scrutinized, a little sick. “Do you want to step outside.”

Air. Fresh air. He doesn't know why it didn’t occur to him earlier, but the thought of stepping outside has him almost dizzy with need. He nods silently at Cath, stumbles outside with her and breathes the same damn humid DC air he breathed that night before, thinks about Bucky, about Jim Morita in the camps, about that bomb. He closes his eyes to the fading sun, bouncing off between marble buildings, and lets it all wash over him. Cath stands nearby, her arms folded uncomfortably over her chest, tapping her heels against the concrete. Steve remembers her voice in the hanger, echoing out over the empty space, and he exhales, opening his eyes.

Sometimes he feels all 90 years he only half-lived. Sometimes, knowing he has to wake up tomorrow and be Captain America is too much.

Cath looks at him. “You’re not history,” she tells him, her face open and sympathetic, and he wants to throw up.

“I’m not history,” he repeats. “Or maybe I am. Just living history, is all.”

He walks back to his hotel alone, jacket over his shoulder, the sun deepening in the sky behind him.


End file.
